The Future of Race Relations Research in Britain: A Social Psychologist's View

Abstract

That white social scientists should be discussing the future of race relations research in a minority academic journal is something of an irony, as Lee Bridges suggested in the first article of this series. In itself it is a good index of the remoteness of race relations research, as we have known it, from its referents. It discounts the views of a large section of our constituency, namely black people, so our discussion is immediately ethnocentric, exclusive, partial and probably unrealistic. This is nothing new, but the pay-off from our previous exclusiveness is the justified hostility black people in this country are now showing towards 'being researched'. So that not only has the activity of research been an exclusively white enterprise, the focus of research is becoming steadily whiter as black people decide to withdraw from further scrutiny. This 'black backlash'1 has been happening in the States for some time; Josephson2 has described how black resistance to surveys is partly motivated by anxiety about the uses to which information will be put (blacks felt the results would 'wind up in police precincts not in the halls of the University'), and partly by disillusionment with the value of research. Josephson's own community health survey in Harlem stirred up a storm of protest in which it was made clear to him (via the protest, not the survey) that many people felt they needed hospitals more than surveys. As he concluded, the basic question is the real importance of the research we do:If we as researchers cannot easily persuade ourselves of the utility of what we do, how can we hope to convince the communities and populations we are studying? To be sure, there may be pay-off from social surveys over the long-run but as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead, and communities such as Harlem are impatient.Both resistance factors are beginning to operate in this country too. It is indeed difficult to point to many tangible benefits black people have at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on June 21, 2015 rac.sagepub.com Downloaded from

The new social psychology and ‘fascism’

“…Action research in social psychology was developed initially in response to fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor is the need for such an approach dead today (Gordon, 1973;Milner, 1973). The failure of action research to dominate the contemporary social psychological tradition is not what is at issue here.…”

Race and Racism

“…Hence by the use of questions and answers we can obtain information about a vast number of actions in a short space of time, the actual observation and measurement of which would be impracticable. Milner (1973) sees the persistence of the social psychologist's view that attitudes and behaviour are directly linked more as a product of pragmatism and convenience than of any deeply held belief that has received rigorous empirical support. On the contrary, in fact, the majority of empirical research into the value of attitudes as a predictor of behaviour tends to show a rather poor fit between the two sets of variables.…”